


Labyrinthine

by magikfanfic



Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)
Genre: Backstory, Blow Jobs, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Hand Jobs, M/M, Porn With Plot, Porn with Feelings, Pre-Rogue One
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-15
Updated: 2017-08-15
Packaged: 2018-12-15 17:37:15
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 14,702
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11810922
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/magikfanfic/pseuds/magikfanfic
Summary: They are sixteen. Chirrut is walking on the top of the low wall that separates the gardens from the training yard while Baze trails along on the ground beside him, shorter than him for once because he doesn’t like heights. Chirrut allows him to hold his hand. They both pretend it is because he needs help steadying his steps, making sure he doesn’t lose his balance despite the fact that Chirrut’s balance is debatably the best in the temple. They do not admit that it is because they would rather touch each other than anyone or anything else on Jedha, potentially anything else in the entire universe.





	Labyrinthine

**Author's Note:**

  * For [mollynoble](https://archiveofourown.org/users/mollynoble/gifts).



> Written for mollynoble for the SpiritAssassin fanworks exchange on Tumblr. The prompt was for some hurt/comfort-maybe dealing with ptsd/anxiety/depression and a request for pre-movie. This spun itself away from me. Hopefully, you'll like it.
> 
> I should also note that the concept of hiding emotions in one's ears and in their feet is attributable to The Weakerthans and comes from their song "My Favorite Chords."

They are sixteen. Chirrut is walking on the top of the low wall that separates the gardens from the training yard while Baze trails along on the ground beside him, shorter than him for once because he doesn’t like heights. Chirrut allows him to hold his hand. They both pretend it is because he needs help steadying his steps, making sure he doesn’t lose his balance despite the fact that Chirrut’s balance is debatably the best in the temple. They do not admit that it is because they would rather touch each other than anyone or anything else on Jedha, potentially anything else in the entire universe. They are sixteen, and the feeling is so large that sometimes Chirrut thinks it will explode out of him like a ray of light. They are sixteen and overwhelmed by it all so they just don’t talk about it, but it pushes against the back of Chirrut’s teeth constantly, desperate to be loosed. He thinks that if he does not watch his words carefully all the affection will fly like a clutch of birds from his lips, a torrid of colored wings big and bright enough to block out the wide expanse of the Jedhan horizon, blot out the sun and leave them covered in dazzling mottled feathers. This, he thinks, would be too much. Bigger and flashier than Baze would be able to bear to look at. He might blush himself to death. So instead he lets them linger against his teeth, counts his words, searches them over like a guard at a gate before they trip into the world just to make sure they aren't too big, too startling.

Chirrut does not admit to himself that he too is scared by the enormity of the feeling, by the way it seems to open its own galaxy in the hollow between his ribs, stretched out beneath the drum of his skin. At night he traces his fingers down his chest and thinks he hears these stars moving, his love birthed planets spinning slowly around the sputtering fire of the sun that is his heart. He worries about slow collapse, a black hole opening up that not even light can escape. He imagines it swallowing all the constellations and nebulas residing inside of him. It startles him awake at night with the idea of its loss, leaves him panting for breath with a hand over his heart to make sure the sun remains, feels it build red hot, blue hot, white hot, more when Baze’s hand will find his and linger, fingers through fingers, and while their bodies have changed, pushed and pulled in different directions as they grow, their hands remain familiar: Chirrut’s longer and more delicate, Baze’s broad but still of a size that fits perfectly in his even though Baze is taller, heavier, a small mountain of sand in the eyes of those near but a nest of soft blankets at his core.

 

They are swimming in the underground pools beneath the temple, the walls of the caves lit by the soft glow of the kyber and the pale, slow bodies of the worms who eat the kyber dust and spin it into webs around the ceiling. The water reflects the light back, and Chirrut feels like he is immersing his body into a sky full of stars. This, he thinks, is what it is like to surrender completely to the Force. He floats on his back, calm and peaceful, lulled into serenity by the glimmering around him as well as the soft lapping of the water against the rocks. Not to mention the hum of all the kyber, a low level thrumming inside and outside of his body. 

And Baze who sings softly, as soft as the brush of his hand against Chirrut’s back, as he floats near him. Chirrut glances over, takes in the sight of Baze with his arms splayed out, his body bared, unashamed for once, eyes closed, hair fanned out around him like a cloud, like a crown, singing the songs of the temple, the songs of NiJedha, the songs of the people of the plains beyond, which is where he came from all those years ago, scraped and bruised, hair tangled, tears dried on his face, sand stuck to every part of him, a scar across his cheek. Baze came from the hills and the valleys and the sand. Baze never had a home that stood still because that was not how his people lived. They wandered through the desert, built their huts in the shadow of the statues in the expanse, learned to live off the sand and the sparse strange, almost wire trees in the bleakness beyond the mesa where NiJedha squats. They lived until they lived no more. Sandstorms, quick sand, raiders, rains in the middle of the night when the sky would crack open and the deluge would be enough to drown people if the tents were in the wrong place. Nomads on Jedha have hard lives.

Baze came to them in shambles, orphaned, almost dead. Baze came to them and didn’t say a word about what had happened, but everyone knew. He spoke the words of the sands in a voice like wind trapped inside of his chest. Despite his size, large even when starving, he moved like lightning across the desert, filling the entire sky. The cascade of his hair was never water but always fluffy, wavy, hiding his face from view. All of his words were Jedhan but not, the particular, seldom spoken language of the sands, supplanted with an entire way of speaking that was regulated to only gestures because the wind can be so loud that sometimes the speech from the mouth is nothing at all, just something to be stolen, to float away, lost to the expanse. 

Baze came to them with nothing but himself, young enough to not be full of the kind of pride that will not accept help from an outstretched hand. He came and stayed, though the temple has yet to shake all the sand from his soul, all the wind from his words, and he talks with his hands still, sings in the language of the desert that is twisted slightly at the edges. Yes, he is theirs. Their devoted initiate, loving and devout and kind, gentle in ways that bloom from a garden held within himself, a way that cannot be taught, yet parts of him remain untouched by them, not them. Parts of him are always of the outside, and his skin is the color of the sand that stole everything from him though he never seems to mind it. Never speaks of it, rarely weeps for what no longer is, what can never be again.

The people of the sands move in clans. If you lose your clan, you cannot join another. They will not take you. They will only look at you and see that the sand has rejected you, that you are no longer a child of the expanse. They will turn their backs and walk away, leave you to whatever fate the sands have decreed is best for you even if it is nothing at all.

Chirrut thought it sounded harsh when it was first explained to him by the masters, but he understands it now. It is not unlike their belief in the guidance of the Force, the way it moves through all things. Everything is as the Force wills it. The Force willed Baze to them is the same as saying that the sand rejected him, that the sand brought him here. Looking at it like that, he understands, though it still seems cruel, it still seems unkind, made even more so by the fact that it was visited on the person with the gentlest soul he has ever encountered in his life, potentially the gentlest soul in the entire universe.

What will you be? He wonders as they float, side by side, barely touching, as the entire world around them is lit and softly glowing, as the sound of Baze’s voice in song rises and falls but never goes above a whisper. Chirrut’s gaze lingers on the other’s body, and he thinks he can find the valleys and the peaks of their moon on the landscape of his form. A cartography that he would like to trace with his fingers and his lips until the song stutters out to nothing but husky moans and words and the repetition of his name in the tone of voice that is only for him, only because of him. 

They are nineteen, floating in the starry waters of the kyber caves, and all Chirrut wants to do is kiss Baze until the universe ends around him, until nothing exists but them. This admission, he thinks, would also be too much, too heavy, would sit on their chests and sink them down, down into the depths of the water, so far that even the light of the kyber would not be able to penetrate. Instead, he says nothing, closes his eyes and listens to the singing, smiles when Baze finds his hand and begins to speak against it because Chirrut could not stand the idea of not learning all those gestures considering how often Baze would use it, still falls into it as easily as breathing. Baze is a man who can build many walls, can keep many secrets inside that great heart of his, which Chirrut will not begrudge him so long as he is allowed a key, and the sign language is good for that when everything inside or outside is too much for spoken words.

 

When the world turns dark and unexpected, when the Empire crawls in on its belly like something deadly, looking and acting small, like there is nothing to fear from it even though the Force changes around it, even though the kyber begins to keen, Chirrut doesn’t understand how Baze remains calm. The sun of Chirrut’s heart burns bright, rage filled, a supernova inside of him that will swallow everything up and burn it to a cinder. He grinds his teeth at night thinking about it while the world around them seems to grow smaller. If it keeps shrinking, he worries that he will end up in a box, entombed in the heart of the moon, stuck with only his anger to keep him warm and fuel him forward until there is no more oxygen, and he snuffs himself out completely.

He wears the Guardian colors, the Guardian robes, he sits on the low wall between the gardens and the training yards, the one he walked along all those years ago while Baze held his hand when they were bashful and shy in love, and it feels like the weight of death lingers under his tongue, sharp and salt, a million edges, a thousand cuts, waiting for him to speak it and bring it into the world around him. Everything soft feels driven out, shoved aside to make way for the waves of ire that he rides, that he feels churn around him. Chirrut thinks that one day soon there will be no more temple, no more Guardians, despite the fact that the Force remains, will always remain. Everything else they have built around it is transitory, the way that life is transitory, but the Whills have existed for so long that it feels like always, that it feels like nothing should be allowed to make it fall.

He thinks he would rather die than watch it fall even though he knows he should bend to the will of the Force like a reed in the wind. Even though he knows he should accept the inevitable course of change. This feels less like change and more like a destruction. This does not feel like the Force at all. At least not like any Force that he has known, that the Whills have shown him. 

They are twenty-five, and Baze wears their marriage plaits in his hair and walks as soundlessly as ever, a flickering mirage in the desert. He settles onto the wall next to Chirrut, pressed bodily against him from shoulder to ankle because space between them has never been something cultivated. The habit was Chirrut’s at first, always touching, leaning, reaching, patting, fingers on elbows and knees, lingering on his face, diving into the tangled strands of his hair to separate them. It started with Chirrut and crept, little by little, until it was full blown on Baze as well and now he almost seems to be the worse of the two, potentially because, so often, Chirrut is the only adult he will touch, though he allows the younglings to clamber up and over him like he is a tree or a statue, makes sure to keep absolutely still so he will not startle them and make them tumble down. Baze, whatever else changes about him, remains a garden of kindness that cannot be taught, grows bountiful blooms that he shares with anyone near, though he always seems to save the loveliest ones for Chirrut.

Baze presses into him, steady like the moon beneath their feet, solid like the Force that coils through the universe, and yet still more beloved than either of them because he is himself. Baze of the sand and the wind with his singing and his scar and the family lost to the wild but the heart that never grew cold and hard the way it could have. Baze who signs, “I love you. I love you,” against Chirrut’s skin whenever they touch, especially now that they have managed to edge away from the shyness of their youth, to embrace the truth of the glimmering bond between them, the want and need both as bright as any chunk of kyber Chirrut has ever seen. 

Chirrut presses his face into Baze’s neck as though he can hide there, escape the roiling lake of displeasure that has staked its claim in his stomach, lingering beneath the universe of love that remains in the space between his ribs. If he focuses on the scent of Baze’s skin, tea and soil and ink and cumin, and the pulse of his heart beneath then maybe the rest of universe and its problems will fade until they are nothing. If he can only sink into the quiet that seems to exist inside of Baze’s body, if he can only escape into the protective wall of his arms, maybe everything else will slow and leave them alone, heart to heart together.

Chirrut knows, of course, that there is no such solace, no such escape. He is a Guardian, Baze is a Guardian, and they have a duty to the Whills. Not just to the Whills, but to the universe, to the Force itself, to maintain the balance, to right wrongs when necessary, and the Empire is nothing if not wrong down to its core. It is all so big, and even though the fire licking through his body feels gigantic enough to consume everything, this is much better, this moment, his face against Baze’s neck and Baze’s fingers tracing random letters onto the back of his hand, waiting patiently as usual for Chirrut to speak or move, letting him have all the time in the world that he needs. Baze is the patient one eighty percent of the time; he says it comes from living in the desert, comes from all the waiting, all the walking through the sand. If you’re fast, the sand can catch you out, move beneath your feet, trap you in a hole and cover you, forget you, give you to the moon itself as an offering to keep the tenuous balance between what lives and what does not. 

When Baze talks like that, Chirrut is glad to have his patient, steady husband because it means that he survived, that he is here for him to love, to love him back. When it becomes an annoyance to wait, to settle and be still while Baze churns through fifteen different possibilities before making a decision, Chirrut reminds himself of that fact. He loves it even when it grates at him, at his need to move quickly, to think fast, to be in constant motion. He loves everything about Baze even the things that Baze does not love about himself, and there are many of those, all of them lovelier than he can ever put into words.

He speaks because he knows that Baze will not. Left to his own devices, Baze can go without saying a word for weeks, will resort to his signing or just existing in silence like the kyber worms in the caves spinning their glowing webs. The month long trial that forbid speech during their Guardian initiation was no challenge for Baze, and Chirrut only managed to suffer through because of the finger language and the fact that they took turns pressing their lips against each other’s skin, mouthing words in a pantomime of speech that was created solely for Chirrut’s benefit. Though truly the thing that hurt the most that month was the lack of Baze’s singing.

“How do you manage?” His voice is sharper than he means it to be, drug down into the anger that laces through his stomach and makes the muscles in his calves twitch for action. 

Baze’s hand passes over his head, brushing through the cropped hair, the gesture and the sound of it calming in a way that it never is when Chirrut mimes the same action, his own always driven more by irritation than anything else. “Manage what, dearest one?” His husband’s voice is a rumble, the sound of planets shifting, and Chirrut, pressed against him as he is, can feel the reverberations through his entire body, soaking into his bones and the lining of his stomach, slowly, slowly edging love into the fire, dampening its bent towards destruction. 

“Everything we know is on the edge. The Empire looms like a terrible cloud. The Force is a riot in my mind. It shrieks long and low like the wind echoing through the corridors at the top of the temple. I want to scream back at it. I want to rage. I want to punch its teeth down its throat if only I knew how, but I cannot and then I feel useless like I have no agency.” Chirrut lifts his head to look at Baze, to watch the way his brow furrows, the crinkles that form around his eyes like puddles in shifted silk, the downturned edges of his mouth, all the million and one ways that everything that Baze is and feels soaks out into the world around him, covers him as easily and brightly as if someone had dipped their fingers in paint and stroked them over his skin. 

Chirrut shifts, cups a hand around the back of his neck, presses them together, forehead to forehead, breathes when Baze breathes, and the gesture is not just for him, is meant to soothe them both because Baze feels everything like drumbeats on the inside of his skull even if he never says a word, but Chirrut knows. Chirrut knows everything about him by now, inside and out, loves every piece of it. So he presses them together, comforts in the way that Baze needs, even as he continues to talk, to ask for a kind of comfort that he needs and does not know how to find anywhere else. “But you, my love, are calm, steady, as gentle as anything in the world. I feel shaken apart, torn in a thousand directions, but you remain a beacon of kindness and light. And I do not know how you manage that right now.” Except that Baze is Baze and everything good springs from his heart. Sometimes Chirrut worries he will run himself dry, leave nothing aside for himself. And sometimes Chirrut thinks a spring that never empties resides inside his body, always ready to give whatever it can to anyone it can. Sometimes he thinks that he would like to sink into it, meld flesh to flesh and drift in the river of Baze’s giving spirit. Sometimes when he meditates, he reaches for Baze instead of the Force, and it is almost better to surrender to the glow inside of him; Chirrut can always tell that the glow inside of Baze loves him. The Force is so much harder to read.

Baze kisses him, gentle, quiet, soft, more like flower petals brushed over his face than the intensity that will quake through them when they are wrapped around each other in their room, in the darkness, finding all the points on their bodies that only they know, when Baze will attempt to muffle his noises with his mouth while Chirrut, frantic, attempts to do things that will draw any noise above controlled moans out of Baze. It is just the press of lips, not hurried, not aching, not starting anything, just another means of connection, just another comforting. And sometimes Chirrut wonders whether he will break with all the love he feels for this man. If it will become too much and swell the sides of his soul, crack his bones and split his skin until it rushes forth like a river, too much inside to ever hold it all, too much to say, too much to feel. Baze kisses him, and it helps in the way that it always helps because who has ever not managed to feel somewhat more hopeful when they are loved.

Baze kisses him and then lingers, close, close enough that Chirrut knows their hearts have already fallen into a rhythm with each other the way that they so often do. Baze places his own hand against the nape of Chirrut’s neck and presses his forehead against Chirrut’s for a moment as if to say I am here, and I will never not be anywhere but here with you. Even when I am not physically at your side, I am with you. I love you.

“I do not feel it like you. I do not hear it like you do, the rush and the pounding. The Force is not so close to me.” Chirrut knows this, but he knows that it is still imbued in everything that Baze is because he can feel it, he can feel it when he touches him and see it when he looks at him and hear it under all his words when he speaks or even when he says nothing at all. Baze might not know the Force the way that Chirrut does, but it knows him, and he can sense it in other, stranger ways that Chirrut does not quite understand.

Baze continues speaking even as his fingers brush over Chirrut’s hairline, threaten to make him dizzy enough from the almost there contact that he will push forward, press their mouths together and lose the line of the conversation in order to be encompassed by the dialogue their bodies inevitably fall into. “But I know it is there, Chirrut, a darkness, a threat. It looms, and it worries me.” He sighs like mountains moving. This, too, is a way in which they are different. Chirrut runs hot, fuels his belly with twinges of fire and action while Baze worries himself to raw pieces, plots out the course of everything bad that could happen in the entire universe and bundles it into his heart until it bleeds from him, until Chirrut has to cradle him in his arms until it is all right again. They balance each other out in this, but he does so wish that Baze would not strip himself down to nothing quite so often.

He moves away slowly, pressing a kiss to Chirrut’s forehead, and his fingers come up, brush through his hair until they trace the shell of his ear, and Chirrut shudders anew at the sensation. “My father told me that it is important to put the best things in small places to protect them so that they will not wash away as fast when life is hard and the body is weak. Your tenderness. Your hope. Hide them in small bones, the inner ear, your feet. Put them there and then come back to them again when you have the need. These things are so deep in your body that only you will know to look there. And the sand is bad at finding them.”

When he swallows it seems to be with effort and there is a wetness in his eyes that Chirrut does not miss, it makes them gleam and shine even brighter than usual as Baze traces his finger around the shell of Chirrut’s ear once more. “I think the ear is safer. There is so much sand on Jedha it can be hard to find your footing sometimes. And you, my love, are not always so careful with your feet. You keep jumping into things without looking. You might injure anything you store there even with your remarkable skill and balance.” His face is somber and grim, a normal face for him yet this one means different things. Only Chirrut knows him well enough to tell the difference.

Of all the many things that Baze does not speak about, his family is at the top of the list. Sometimes Chirrut wonders if they existed at all or if Baze really did just rise from the sands of Jedha, created by the moon herself because she had wished him into being, needed something so dear and so blessed to walk her surface and bring her grace and softness into being. Though Baze, like Jedha herself, is not softness through and through. Chirrut has seen his husband with a gun, has watched his aim, true and purposeful, has seen him fight. Jedha has a heart of kyber, and she willed that to her son as well. 

This is different. This is Baze speaking of his people, of his father, bringing out words and ideas of an entire tribe lost to the sands in front of him, taken by some tragedy that cannot be breathed into the air or signed through his hands because it is too much. Yet for Chirrut, he calls the ghosts out, and Chirrut feels so loved that he forgets the fire, forgets the screaming black shadow of the Empire in their midst. All he sees is Baze, steady and quiet, willing always to take pieces of himself in order to comfort when needed. All Chirrut sees is his husband treading onto ground that makes him uncomfortable in order to help him, and all Chirrut wants is to pay that kindness back.

“Do you store them in your ears?” Chirrut asks because he isn’t sure what else to say, doesn’t know how best to say thank you for what he has been given. All he wants is to see Baze smile. “Is that why they are so large, husband?” He reaches out to pull on one of the lobes gently, which makes the corners of Baze’s lips quirk. “There is so much tenderness in you that your ears kept growing until they could safeguard all of it. You should have told me sooner. I would not have pulled on them as much for fear of breaking your kind heart. I also would have been careful not to step on your feet when you were teaching me how to dance. Have I bruised all your hiding places? Let me kiss them better. They are so dear to me.” He pulls Baze’s head down to press chaste kisses against his ears one after the other, and then reaches for his feet.

Baze catches his hands, laughing softly, as downy as the wings of a baby bird, pulls him up and nestles back into his side. “Chirrut, you are so dear to me. I am so full of tenderness for you that I would need sixteen more ears to store it all.”

Chirrut shakes his head sadly, face a mockery of despondency. “Even you are not handsome enough to pull off that look, husband. I would have to divorce you for someone prettier.”

They are twenty-five, and Baze’s hair is braided into their marriage plaits, and they sit side by side on the garden wall as they have done many times before, and Baze’s laughter is loud enough that Chirrut thinks it can be heard across the entire moon. He sinks into it. He floats into the stream of Baze’s laugh, and the universe of love in the space between his ribs expands and grows. It stretches, blazes, shines so bright that none of the darkness can exist in that moment. He buries his face into Baze’s neck and sucks marks onto his skin until Baze shifts and in a rough, husky voice suggests they retire to their quarters. And as they walk back, hand in hand, Chirrut sends shooting stars of his inner galaxy to his ears, to hide there, to nestle, to linger in the whirl of the seashell, at the heart of the labyrinth so that he can always find it again but no one else can invade, nothing else can pillage it.

 

He is thirty-seven and blind, his world is a shambles around him, the Force never stops screaming though its cries and the cries of the inhabitants of Jedha mingle, fit together into an elaborate puzzle that even Chirrut with his clever fingers and whip sharp mind cannot sort out and sometimes he does not even have the strength to try because everything has fallen away around him, which he predicted when he was younger but did not try quite hard enough to keep it from occurring, certain that, somehow, everything would work out alright in the end. Chirrut sits on the crumbling ruins of the low wall that once separated the temple gardens from the training ground, staff in hand, and wars between the waves of pity and the waves of anger. There is so much of both that he feels like the entire universe has turned into a whirlpool purposefully designed to drag him under and drown him. Chirrut has never been the sort of man to go down without a fight, but he is blind and alone and nothing has been kind or gentle to him in far too long. Sometimes, some days, he wants to show the universe the quality of his teeth, the crushing impact of his blows, how he doesn’t need his eyes to make a shot with his lightbow. He was taught to shoot by the best marksman on Jedha, after all, though Chirrut wonders if that title is his now. 

Evening is coming. He can tell by the shift in the light in the world around him, hazy but still there, the sort of difference that only the blind know, and by the way the wind picks up, the sharp tang of cold beneath it. Soon night will follow, and he will be alone in the shambles of the temple he called home from the moment it was a word he could say before he even fully understood the concept of it. He is thirty-seven, and somewhere Baze is thirty-eight, but he does not know where he is or if he even is anymore. 

As he so often does when he thinks about his husband, lost to him, lost to Jedha, lost even to himself, Chirrut wraps his fingers around his ear, touches the shell and rubs the lobe, thinks about the tiny star nestled inside of him, how it remains even though he thinks the universe between his ribs did implode, did become so heavy that it collapsed in on itself, created a black hole that not even light can escape, smothered the burning sun of his heart, but it remains in his ear, remembered, whispering, and it reminds him of shy kisses and the glow in the kyber caves and Baze’s hair and Baze’s laugh, the scar across his face, the million and one things that were only ever him, the sort of love that he thinks no one else can replace, no one else could ever conjure up inside of him now that that black hole pulses, now that the river of fire in his gut is a volcano spitting rage into all the bits of his system.

No danger in the universe is as great as the danger of love. And it is the only one where the reward is worth the risk. Though he never imagined that loving Baze would be a risk at all, always figured that of the two of them Baze was the one risking everything by loving him. It is funny how the Force works, how it winds around, how it cares one minute and then does not seem to care much at all. Of course these days it just screams, stuck in its own misery, and Chirrut cannot blame it for there is much to be miserable about. 

All things considered, he should be miserable for so many reasons other than the loss of love, but some days, like today, it is the only thing that he can properly feel. So he touches his ear until he can almost feel Baze’s arms around him, hear his laugh in the air, smell him. He touches his ear and wonders how long he is supposed to let everything linger there, how long he should wait. Whether he ever should have waited at all. At some point would it not to be wise to let it go, to let it fade into nothingness? Baze told him where to hide things in his body but not how long to leave them there. Of course, Baze never was the type to let anything go. 

Until he left. Left Jedha. Left the sands and the wind and the ruined temple. Left the moon that had birthed him and kept him. Left for the stars with his back bowed with blasters and sorrow. Cut his hair and put his marriage plaits in Chirrut’s hand because, as he said, he no longer deserved them, no longer deserved Chirrut, didn’t protect the temple, didn’t protect Chirrut, failed at all his duties as a husband and Guardian utterly. Baze freed him from their vows if he wanted with those actions. And Chirrut stood, silent because he was trapping the words behind his teeth, too heavy and too weighty, too much in that moment to unleash on Baze who was already hurting, already dragged down by his own weight. Not even Chirrut’s hands spoke because they were full of hair and longing. He could not make them move. He could not make anything move until Baze had boarded the shuttle, and then he had broken all the plates while screaming and signing all of those stoppered words into the air. 

“I am not leaving you,” Baze had said, and his voice filled the space between them with a chill that Chirrut had never felt before, like ice water, like the Jedhan wind cutting to the bone, like a plant in the gardens not properly tended. “I am leaving myself. I no longer deserve you. I no longer deserve myself.”

Chirrut had not even been able to ask if he would come back. He still does not ask. There is no one to ask. There is nothing to ask. Not the Force. It weeps too hard over its own losses to contemplate the plight of one man and his lost love. He cannot ask the marriage plaits tucked under his pillow, Baze’s scent long since wrung out of them, filled instead with the salt of Chirrut’s tears and the curses muttered under his breath. And the moans, the pleas, the strangled cries in his throat when the only release he can find is in thinking about Baze, his mouth, his hands, his body, the way he would kiss and touch and chuckle against Chirrut’s abdomen, nuzzle his beard against his thighs and lick. Nothing makes his groin quicken to life as thoroughly or as fast as just one thought of all the times they were tangled together. His skin is never right afterward, and he will sit, naked, on the cold stone floor through the night to chastise himself for the weakness, and to try and chase away the phantom fingers spelling “I love you, I love you” against his back, the ones that never ever come no matter how much he wishes for it to happen, no matter how long he waits.

He will continue to wait. Of course, he will continue to wait. As long as the stars, that wayward, cast off nebula, lingers in his ear, turns slowly, sends shudders through his veins in the middle of the night when a gust of wind feels like air blown across his neck, he will continue to wait. Eighty percent of the time Baze was the patient one, but Chirrut has never liked losing. He can be patient. The only thing left in Jedha that is not controlled by the Empire seems to be time, after all.

 

Chirrut is thirty-eight, blind, and alone, sitting naked on the cold stone floor of the temple cell that he still occupies even though the temple is no more, even though his way of life is no more. It is the quiet part of the morning that is practically still night, and he can tell because of the way the wind smells, the way that there is a creeping lightness, a lingering warmth across the expanse of the world that he can no longer see, will never see again. He dreamed of Baze, woke with his name on his lips, the feel of him under his fingers, aching for him, and crawled out of bed onto the floor in an attempt to forget, in an attempt to banish him and all the swirling colors of his cosmos back into the labyrinthine shell of his ear. There is no hope that he will shake it. It never leaves him, nestled too far in.

No matter what he sometimes says aloud, shouting, raving at a man who is not there to hear his anger, to hear his hurt, he never wants it to.

If there is a sound, he does not hear it. If the Force manages to shake itself out of its own despair to speak to him, he does not heed it. One moment he is alone on the floor, desperately trying to push all of the love in his body back into his ear, and the next there is the fleeting, flickering feel of fingers on his back, fingers signing, “I love you, I love you,” followed by “I’m sorry.” And Chirrut tenses under the contact ignores it, pretends that it is the wind, that it is just his mind, that it is not warm fingers whose calluses he knows though there are more of them now. That the scent of Baze, different, cloyed with more metal and less ink, no flowers, but still him, surrounds him like a cloud, like a blanket, like something he could fall into eternally and never feel the desire to resurface.

“Chirrut,” Baze says, and his voice seems steady, seems like him but perhaps a little thicker as though it has not been used in a while, and Chirrut does not think about the way that Baze can stay quiet for hours at a time if allowed, does not consider whether he has spoken to anyone in the span of time between their parting and this moment.

Chirrut tilts his head away from the sound of him, does not reach, does not try and catch and hold onto him the way he wants to, does not pull him into his lap to kiss him and run fingers over every inch of skin that he can and then rend fabric away so he can get to the rest of it. He presses all of these impulses down, down into his feet where he has not hidden anything before because Baze warned him against it, thought it might break there due to his lack of caution. That is fine. This can break, he thinks. This he can lose. 

He is lying, of course.

There is the clunk of several heavy things hitting the floor all at once as though Baze was carrying them and just let them go because something more important needs him. This is the way he has always been, letting everything go for someone else. And Chirrut’s breath catches in his throat as Baze’s cheek presses into his back, as his arms loop around his waist, hold him tight, one hand on his chest, over his heart. They are thirty-eight, and Chirrut wants to be mad, wants to turn and shove him away, shove him across the room, grab his staff and push it into his chest while he yells, while he unleashes everything inside of himself that has grown thick like tangled vines of regret and resentment. 

But with Baze’s lips against his back, mouthing words on his skin that Chirrut cannot quite grasp yet, he cannot make it back to that swirling whirlpool of anger inside of him. It dries, bit by bit, as the lips move, as the hands press, gentle but firm. He does not move. Instead, he closes his eyes and hangs his head and tries not to cry, though it is futile when he finally figures out what the words are, the words spoken against his flesh, pressed into his back as though they can sink and lodge into his body itself. “I will not leave you. I will not leave you again.”

Chirrut wraps his fingers around Baze’s wrists and pulls because he is worried about the tears that will clog his words if he attempts to speak, worried also about the pain and insults he might hurl as well if he is not careful to bar them at the gate. He does not want to speak them now, would rather loose his tongue to roam inside of Baze’s mouth and see if he still tastes the same. Would rather sigh under the press of Baze’s hands over his flesh and picture him as he has always been inside his mind. He catches his wrists and pulls and Baze, always intent, ever able to infer his wishes even when they go unspoken, loosens his grip and signs one more lingering “I love you,” against Chirrut’s skin as he moves. 

“Take your clothes off.” It surprises him that his voice does not shake when it cuts the air. 

“Chirrut,” Baze begins, and he isn't sure he understands the hesitation, thought they got over all the shame years ago. This man suddenly seems no different than the one he shyly undressed for the first time, the one he wooed and adored and praised bit by bit as each layer of clothing was undone, and how hot Baze’s skin was under his mouth when he finally pressed his lips against it had made him harder than he thought possible. 

“Your clothes stink of engines and fuel, and I would rather they were off.” It is an exaggeration but not a lie. What Chirrut really wants, more than anything, more than all those years back, more than his home rebuilt around him, is just Baze’s skin against his own, bare, his, a physical proclamation that this is real. There is the silence of Baze’s hesitation. “I thought we agreed to obey, husband.”

“Chirrut, I. The plaits. We.” The words stumble and trip as Baze seems unable to complete any of his sentences, though Chirrut doesn’t really need him to in order to understand the meaning contained there.

He is blind, but he has never needed his eyes to find Baze anyway, catches him and holds him steady even though he knows there are still tears in his eyes. “No, I kept them. You're still mine. I'm still yours. Baze, you offered me a freedom I never asked for, but all I wanted was you. All I want is you. I did not take another. Only you. Even in my dreams when you were not with me it was only you. Did you?” He is not sure he wants the answer, but he can feel how vehemently Baze shakes his head, shakes his entire body before he even speaks. 

“I have only known you. Only ever wanted you.” It is no lie, of course. Chirrut has never known Baze to lie, especially when it matters. There is the sound of fingers over zippers and buttons, quite a lot of both. There are snaps, metal, plastic that falls to the floor as much as cloth rustling and Chirrut wonders how many layers Baze has used to hide, how many shells he has built around himself in order to camouflage everything that he is, to keep it inside and the rest of the universe away from him, protect all the things that he cannot afford to lose.

Chirrut wipes his face with his hands, runs fingers over his hair and then shoves them under his legs because otherwise he will grab and pull and caress, he will touch and touch until he can do nothing else, and he will be too fast. And part of him does not want to be too eager for this even though he is, thick already with the want, his body five steps ahead of his heart, which is stuttering back to slow life, the universe trickling from his ear into the space between his lungs again. “How did you find me?” 

Baze’s fingers on his cheek are as soft as his voice, and Chirrut forces down the temptation to bite at them and pull them into his mouth. “I can always find you. It's myself I lose. I was wrong to go, Chirrut. I should have stayed. I thought maybe disembodied love would be better for you, was better than what I had left to offer, which felt like nothing. I thought it might be better for me. It was not.” His lips on Chirrut’s cheek are gentle but dry, his beard scratches slightly, and Chirrut sighs as Baze kisses the tear trails away, yet does not reach for him. He could still disappear. 

“Beloved, will you look at me?” Now Baze’s voice is the one thick with emotion, his fingers trailing down Chirrut’s arms such that he cannot pretend not to know the meaning behind the words. 

Once he invites him into the circle of his arms, he will be real or he will fade away utterly. Once he takes this step forward there is no retreat. He is doomed either way, and it is so much better to surrender to the spinning, boundless tangle of the universe made new beneath his sternum. Chirrut slips his hands out from under his thighs and reaches, finds steady, warm flesh with his fingers and cannot stifle the groan, which Baze matches though softer and bitten off, and tugs him forward. Baze settles on his lap, solid, heavier than before, but still much as he recalls, and Chirrut passes hands gently over his skin, traces scars whose stories he does not know but hates whoever put them there, strokes up the fleshy expanse of Baze’s stomach where the softness hides the powerhouse within, feels Baze shift, his hardness press against him, and thrills that he is still so quick to wake under his touch. 

He avoids his face, lingering instead on pectorals, brushing through the curls of chest hair, across the line of Baze’s shoulders that are like the mountains one can see in the distance out in the middle of the desert. The mountains that he will never see again, though he finds them here, dips into the hollow of Baze’s clavicle, which is like the drop off between their mesa and the sands. Baze is patient, and predominantly silent, though he sighs and shifts and shudders beneath the lingering touches as they continue down his arms. More scars here. Some that Chirrut knows but far too many that he has no words for, no story behind. “You will tell me,” he says, rubbing across one that is jagged as if he can erase it with only his care. “Each and every one of these. You will tell me.” He cannot keep the note of insistence out of his voice because there are too many things between them, too many walls, and Chirrut has never liked secrets, never enjoyed places hidden from him, wants to be the one to discover everything, to know everything about Baze, the way he always used to. The scars and their unknown origins seem like an affront to what they were before.

“Yes,” Baze says, his voice thick, and Chirrut knows why he has been avoiding his face. “Later, though.” The fingers around his wrists press without containing because Baze has never tried to contain him, though he communicates in differing amounts of pressure sometimes, and Chirrut can read it perfectly without even trying to, as easily as if there had never been an expanse between them, just one day following another instead of a parting. But he waits, makes him say it because his galaxy is still rebuilding and, of the two of them, Chirrut is the one who can be petty no matter what Baze says. 

“Beloved, please.” Baze lifts his hands to accompany his words, raises them to settle on either side of his face, and Chirrut considers letting them fall, going back to his chest or lower to skirt the edges of his erection and see what kind of pleading that would elicit, but he does not. Because he wants to look. He does. Even if he is slightly concerned about what he will find, how much he will find, how much of them both this will rend bare. 

Baze always said that Chirrut was the strong one, but he does not feel strong now, he feels stretched thin and shuddering, still slightly convinced that this tactile mirage will fade away, leave him hard and wanting and ruined sitting on the stone floor with the slowly rising sun flickering in through the windows. He is half convinced that he is out of his mind at last from solitude and quiet and the screams of the Force that reverberate through his body in a way that is a dark reflection of what pressing his ear to Baze’s chest while he sang felt like when they were younger.

When Baze lifts his hands away, placing them almost chastely against Chirrut’s waist, fingers unable to not lightly caress the flesh there, Chirrut does not drop his own hands, though his touch is feathers, petals, and it does not move from where Baze left it. “Baze, sing for me.” He swipes one finger over the beard, over his lips, and Baze shudders and crawls further into his lap, but he does not let himself get distracted by that, by how easy it would be to catch him off guard, to overpower him and wrest him onto his back, to smother Baze’s body with his own, touch everywhere, kiss everywhere, bite and suck marks onto visible patches of skin because it has been too long and Chirrut needs them both to know that this is how they remain despite the distance of time. He does not, though. He lingers, hand on cheek, finger on lips, and wonders whether his expression is as gentle as he wants it to be or as stone and solid as he fears it is. “Please, my heart.”

When he begins, it is quiet, it is far too quiet, and Chirrut, desperate to hear it, has to stop himself from spurring him on, demanding that it be louder. He does not know how long it has been since Baze sang, but he thinks that it sounds like quite awhile. Perhaps he has not sung at all in the years forgotten, the lost years when they were not together, and he did not sing for ages before that because the world was too hard, and Baze could not get to the softness. Baze sings but not the songs of the temple or NiJedha; he sings the songs of the sands, and Chirrut sighs wistfully and allows his fingers to move. It is as he had feared, Baze is crying in the steady, quiet way that he does when tears simply trickle from his eyes as though he cannot stop them, as though he does not even know they are there. Sometimes this is worse than weeping because it makes Chirrut think of a tap turned on inside him that no amount of coaxing can close, that he will simply cry until the well is dry until Jedha has moved the last of her sorrow through him.

When they wed, Chirrut vowed happiness. Of all the things he wanted to give Baze, promised, that was the one that he had deemed the most important. Happiness and acceptance and love. The universe has not worked in their favor, and it makes his heart clench. It was a vow he meant to keep, but the turnings of the universe around them made it impossible to do so because Baze, even as turned inward as he can be, has never been able to ignore what is happening around him, is too in sync with some emotional thread of the Force such that when it sorrows, he sorrows, and it seems like nothing else can exist inside of him, no matter what he hides in the swirls and shelters of his bones. And Chirrut had gotten so angry at everything happening that it had been hard to protect Baze from all of it. Broken vows, though, like broken plates can be mended, especially if the intent remains true.

Baze’s singing is a steady backdrop in the room, a blanket that Chirrut has been without for far too long, and he tries to brush the tears away with his thumbs only to feel more fall onto his skin like rain. This is where he should tell a joke. This is where he should make him laugh, but all his humor is run out in the moment. He would rather settle into this and let its waves crash over them. Everything is so heavy. The world is so heavy. His fingers slip into Baze’s hair, wild and tangled, still wavy and thick, long again but unbraided and that makes his heart squeeze almost to bursting. Because Baze did what he had said, he cut the plaits and left, gave Chirrut freedom to do as he wanted, did not put them back.

It hurts. He will not stand for it. “I’ll fix your hair tomorrow.” Chirrut clicks his tongue like he would at disobedient children. “You cannot leave it this way. It’s a mess. What will people think? I cannot let you out in public like this. They would think I am neglecting you.”

Baze’s hands slip to his back and his lips quirk up at the edges but the singing does not falter, not until Chirrut’s fingers find his ears where they are buried in the hair. Chirrut traces the shell of them, the lobes, and the song fades out as Baze’s breath catches in his throat, and Chirrut thinks he is crying harder, wishes he could see him. Of everything in the universe, Baze is the sight that Chirrut misses the most, especially now that he is back under his fingers, in his lap, warm and solid and him, his. Chirrut holds his ears between his fingers and feels his own internal galaxy expand. Not a black hole after all. Or maybe one that is exploding, somehow forcing back into the universe everything that it had swallowed. Creating again after tearing it all down. Perhaps this is how the Force works, too.

“Is your tenderness still here?” Chirrut does not ask of hope, knows exactly where and when that died and does not wish to walk upon the grave, but tenderness was birthed in Baze, should know no other home as much as it knows him. He needs it to remain as much as he needs oxygen filling his lungs and blood running through his veins, as much as he needs this man in his lap, as dear and integral to him as if pieces of his heart had been carved out at his birth and hidden inside of him such that it can only beat when Baze is near.

“As much as ever I think.” Baze’s voice is strained, always the sign of more tears. 

Chirrut leans in, lets go, kisses his throat and feels more than hears the noise that Baze makes, cannot quite determine which one of them is shaking, thinks it could be both, shudders passed from body to body, sharing that as they have shared so much over the years. “I forgive you.”

“You shouldn't.”

He bites hard enough to leave a mark, and Baze moans, arches his hips, and they are both so hard that Chirrut knows this dance will not last long. He wants to spend eternity in it, fall into it like a void, let nothing else exist except their reunion. The universe could blink out in the next two minutes, and he would be fine with it. He is fulfilled. His heart is full fit to bursting, and there are supernovas between his lungs, and he wants to tell Baze how he would drown in the lapping waves of his love, but it is still perhaps too much to say. He is just returned, and Chirrut picks his words in order to not scare him away. Kisses his throat again, sucks at the skin, and they are both canting their hips, seeking friction. He kisses and licks even as Baze’s hands slip down his back to his hips and then his thighs, close but not yet near enough to his cock to satisfy his desire. 

Chirrut sighs against his throat. “I have to. You won't forgive yourself. You'll punish yourself until we're just bits of backdrop in the flow of the Force. But I will forgive you every day, my love, with lips and hands and tongue. Until forgiveness is tucked in your ear as well.”

“By rights, you should make me beg for it,” Baze stutters and moans, and whether it is meant to be or not, it is filthy in Chirrut’s ears, makes him throb and thread his fingers even tighter into Baze’s hair, pull slightly to earn another rumbling gasp.

“Don’t worry. I’ll make you beg before we’re done.” 

It earns him a light chuckle, which he can feel pass from Baze’s body to his own where they are pressed together, slotted close and almost complete in union. The loss of his sight was a backhand across the face, a knee to the stomach, a foot sweeping him to the ground; the loss of Baze was a void inside his chest, a hole in the fabric of the Force. Now, not even an hour with his love in his arms, and he feels like an overflowing pitcher once again, stars poised to flood from his mouth into the air every time he speaks, any tears he cries probably shimmering and effervescent like the webs of the worms in the kyber caves.

Baze’s hands squeeze his thighs lightly, and Chirrut growls against his throat to remind him that he will not break, not from this. There are many ways to tear him apart but the grip of Baze’s fingers will never be one of them. 

“You're ridiculous,” Baze sighs, and it is like they have never been apart at all, that is how quickly the banter returns. In a universe full of signs and portents these are the ones Chirrut holds above all others, that he and Baze can fit perfectly back together no matter the hurt, no matter the time or distance or the broken vows. “One day that mouth will get you in trouble.”

He lifts his head, tries to approximate where Baze is based on sound and breathing alone, tilts his head the way he always would when looking at him adoringly or coy, the ways that would make Baze blush and turn away, flustered. “Here I thought it was always my mouth getting me out of trouble. Especially with you. Don't you like my mouth, love? Silver tongued and nimble, I think you said that once. Along with oh please fu..”

His words are cut off before he can finish the sentiment, Baze’s lips crushed against his own, mouth open and greedy, but Chirrut is infinitely needier, threads both of his hands into Baze’s hair and pushes his tongue into the other's mouth. It is the sort of deep, searing, lingering kiss that would have gotten him hard in moments when they were younger, the sort of all consuming embraces that would occur after sparring or studying, in dark corners of the temple when passions boiled over and they could think of nothing except touching each other, getting as close as possible. Baze tastes slightly like tears and dust, but the way he clings, the way he moans as his fingers grip bruises into Chirrut’s thighs is fire and want and everything. Chirrut’s erection needs no new spurring, but that does not stop the pulse of desire from threading through his body directly to it.

They are both panting for air when Baze breaks away, leaning his forehead against Chirrut’s and his fingers drift down to skate over the rise of Chirrut’s pubic bone and still lower, a ghost of a touch over his cock that makes him groan and curse and shudder beneath him. All Chirrut wants to do is more. More kissing, more touching, lips and hands and chasing completion until the heady sparks of climax consume them both. He is tempted once again to shift them, tip Baze onto his back and smother his body with kisses until he does beg, the sweetest sound in the universe because it comes from the man he loves still as much as ever despite everything because of everything.

Instead, he speaks, lets loose some of the words that have been standing in a careful line behind his teeth. “I thought I would only ever know you again in dreams. I thought you were lost to me. I could not feel you. I could not find you. When I reached there was nothing, and I had never expected that to happen.”

Baze tilts his head to rub his beard against Chirrut’s cheek, worries his lips over his flesh, never enough to make him stop talking but more to remind him that he is solid, that he is right there, does not try to stop the spread of words, and it is comforting in the way that only Baze can be comforting in such silence. “I was half convinced to empty out all my tenderness and leave love for dead. I thought it might be better to lose it all than live with it constantly muttering in my ear but never allowed to speak to it or touch it.” When lips find the pulse point on his neck and suck, Chirrut moans as loudly as he wants to, the sort of noise that would have made Baze nervous about being caught out even after they were married. Now, of course, there is no one to hear but them, and Chirrut cannot be bothered to attempt to control himself, especially not when it feels so good, when it has been so long.

“I know,” Baze says, kisses from neck to ear, speaking between presses of his lips and swipes of his tongue even as his fingers continue to stroke lines of blissful agony on Chirrut’s upper thigh because close so close but still infinitely too far away. “I could feel you. Sometimes it felt like the only thing I could feel was you, and you were fire and you were angry. I was.” His voice shakes, and Chirrut runs a hand down his arm to soothe him, to spur the words forward because he would have them, he would have all of them, suck on them like hard sweets from the stalls, consume them little by little, savor each piece until the last. “I was frightened of what you thought of me. I thought maybe you could forget me, let me go, and then I could fade away and be nothing.”

Chirrut’s hand in his hair is tighter than it means to be, but the rush that goes through him at those words cannot be contained. “You will never be nothing to me. How much of my heart is in you?” Baze shifts against him, hard cock pressing into his skin, and Chirrut wants it, longs to run his tongue over it, suck him into his mouth and hear him curse and moan until he comes in his silent, breathy, Baze way, a rumble, a tremor, an earthquake through his entire body, but he does nothing of the sort, not yet. 

“As much of your heart is in me as mine is in you,” Baze replies without even a moment’s faltering and follows it up with a kiss behind Chirrut’s ear that makes him hum from pleasure.

“What brought you back?”

“I could feel you. Beneath the anger and the sadness, I could always feel how much you loved. I just,” he stops, sighs, buries his face into Chirrut’s neck like he can hide there and maybe nothing will touch him, and Chirrut runs his fingers into his hair, softer now, in a way that is meant to carry him forward. Baze’s words have always been like some heady liquor to Chirrut, making him dizzy and drunk on them, intoxicated, unable to get enough, always wanting more. Words, feelings, poetry, songs. Baze speaks, and Chirrut’s world opens. No one has ever said things that are as true, down to the core, as what Baze says. He means his words, had to be taught to tease because it was against his nature to let loose things that were not completely honest, not completely of his heart.

The tragedy, of course, in speaking this way is that it makes the speaker vulnerable. “I was supposed to protect you,” Chirrut breaths out, tipping his face against Baze’s head, the words swallowed by his hair, explorers searching through the tangled curls to hopefully slide into the shell of his ear and disappear to linger with all the other truths. “I did not manage to do that, my love, and I am sorry.”

“Chirrut, I did not deserve you or your protection.” His words are thick, and there are tears, hot rivers, against his skin. 

“I have told you before, and I will tell you forever. You deserve everything.” Chirrut’s fingers are not yet completely used to finding him, but they manage quite well because he is known. He is known and seared into every cell of Chirrut’s body. So it is only slightly difficult to cup his hands around his chin and bring his head up, and he only misses a little when he goes to kiss, softer now, sweeter, forgiveness and reverence as much as need. Baze sighs into his mouth moves against him, and his shoulders seem to lighten, his entire body seems to lighten as though each kiss, each declaration of love brushes weights away that he loaded himself up with. Baze has always carried far too much, more than anyone Chirrut has ever known. It was one of the many reasons that Chirrut fell in love with him. 

“I thought your love would falter,” Baze says when Chirrut pulls out of the kiss but not so far that their lips do not touch with every word spoken. “It never did, and I. It hurt, Chirrut. You hurt. Everything hurt. Especially without you. It was like being in the desert again, alone, with only the Force and the memory of love and my family tucked into my ears and my feet like my father told me to do. I was not strong enough to sustain myself on memories alone, and it was not fair to do that to you when you refused to be freed.”

“Silly, soft, lovely man. From the moment you stumbled out of the desert and into my home, I only wanted you. Before I even knew what it meant, I just wanted to be near you. Then when I realized what it was, how deep it went, it was like kyber growing in my chest, overwhelming, all-consuming. No one would ever want to be free of that. I can manage without you, my love, but I do not want to.” Chirrut runs his fingers over Baze’s face, the lingering tears, the scar he has known forever, into his beard which is ill kept, across his chapped lips, feels how Baze reacts to each touch, the shifting, the tremors, thinks he can hear the way his heart beats faster and faster still because it is as much his own heart, after all. “The universe is not good right now, but things are better when you are near me. I feel like I could breathe stardust.”

Baze kisses his cheeks, his forehead, his neck. “That is because you are a star.”

Chirrut catches his chin, holds him still, and tries to position his eyes in such a way that it might seem like he is looking at him again, even though the only images of Baze that he will ever have are the ones that live inside of his head. Baze in candlelight in the temple, meditating long past the point when everyone else has left. Baze with the sun in his curls in the garden, laughing, head thrown back and neck a tempting line of lovely flesh. Baze with eyes shut tight, illuminated by moonlight through the window, hands clenched into the covers as they made love for the first time. Baze learning how to make the marriage plaits, shy and flushed, his fingers shaking so much that his first try was a disaster, and his eyes filled with tears until Chirrut redid them himself. Baze weeping openly, tears spattering the barrel of his blaster while tongues of fire licked up a temple wall. 

Chirrut will never have any new sights of him, and it hurts, yes, but he has him back to make new memories with and that is something very big indeed. 

“I am full of stars only because you put them there.” These are the big words, the too much words, the sorts of things that Chirrut has been holding back for ages because he was always concerned about how they would break against the rock of Baze’s skin, whether they would break him. Of the two of them, Chirrut has always been the glib one, always the one whose words were more like rubber than granite, bouncing, light, like a bird. These are not bird sentiments, not at all. These are mountains, oceans, planets, things that take so much longer to wear down, ages, eons. When I say I love you, he thinks, I am saying that I will love you until nothing else is left in the entire universe. He knows why the Jedi warned against this sort of attachment, but they were wrong. He thinks that they were just afraid of it, the loss of it, as he has been afraid, as he was afraid for years. But they are gone, and yet he remains, Baze remains, love remains, and the Force is still there, flooding through all of it, still crying though soothed somewhat.

Or maybe it is just that he can hear something other than the crying now.

“Then I will never stop filling you with them,” Baze says, catches him in yet another kiss that makes Chirrut’s loins quicken and ache even as everything unfurls from the labyrinth inside his ear, bursts quick-fire through his veins, suffused everywhere, nebulas and suns and satellites, a universe unearthed.

There is a joke in there, of course. There is a lewd comment that he could make, but it is hard to think about it when Baze’s tongue is in his mouth and Baze’s hands are slipping down his body to linger lightly against his cock again. All he can do is moan and shift, press his hips insistently upward, closer, attempt to get more contact, find release even as he kisses back, hungrily, his own fingers tangled into Baze’s hair, twining, and tugging, demanding as he is always so needy, wants so much. It has been so long since he touched, tasted, kissed, stroked, felt. All of his skin seems like it is on fire inside and out, but it does not feel wrong, not like it does sometimes when he has chased completion on his own with only the memory of Baze around him to spur him onward. That would leave him shuddering but empty as though he had just made love to a ghost, to nothing at all, alone because there was no one to cradle him in the afterglow, no one to kiss him and cherish him the way that Baze always did, constantly putting up with Chirrut strewn across him bodily even when it was too hot, too close for that.

When Baze shifts away, Chirrut scrambles to catch at him and pull him back, but there is only one instant before he realizes what the other is doing, picking him up to settle him on the edge of the bed, which is only slightly softer than the floor, but Chirrut understands why it is the better choice. Baze, however, does not follow him, does not clamber up to linger over his body with kisses or to stretch out beside him and just grope lazily. Instead, Chirrut hears him sink onto the floor, his hands hooking around the backs of Chirrut’s knees to pull him close. And then his fingers are gliding up his thighs, spreading his legs apart, and Chirrut lets him, his breaths coming faster. Oh, he wishes he could see him, especially when lips follow the fingers, kissing over his thighs, the beard scratching slightly all the while, and Chirrut moans, one hand twisted into the thin cover, the other patting until it finds Baze’s hair and gets lost in it, settles on his ear to pull gently, which makes Baze hum against his leg. His mouth and his fingers are so close, moving up, hot flares on his skin, and his cock throbs with the further teasing.

“Baze,” he breaths as his husband kisses through his pubic hair to the base of him, nose brushing against his erection. It is splendid. It is wonderful, but it is not enough. Not yet. “Fuck, love.” His voice is choked, stuttering on the words. “Please.” If he comes from just this alone he thinks that it would almost be a waste, but it would be possible. Everything has culminated in him being taut and on the edge, his body infinitely more turned on than he had realized when they were carefully sifting through emotions and now he thinks he could finish in just a few strokes. 

Ever the perfectionist, Baze is slow, arduously so, as his tongue circles the tip of Chirrut’s cock in a way that makes him groan and thrust shallowly into the contact, desperately seeking more of it, wanting to sink into the mouth that has brought him pleasure time and again, wrung it out of him, gasping his appreciation into the night. Oh, he used to love to watch the sight of Baze’s lips around his cock sometimes enough to almost make him come in and of itself, but that is robbed from him now. The sadness only lingers for a moment, a cool hand in the bottom of his belly, before Baze’s lips finally settle around him, and he takes him in, quickly, deep, his fingers grasping tightly onto his hips in a way that will leave more bruises for him to fret over later. Chirrut keens and moves forward slightly, letting go of Baze’s ear to tug on his hair again in a way that makes him shudder and moan around his cock, the vibrations another delicious piece of pleasure.

There is no way this will last long, not with Baze sucking and licking and teasing as expertly as ever, hands moving now to spread across the skin of his inner thighs or squeezing at the base of him, cupping his balls. Baze works him over with his mouth even as he brushes fingertips down to circle his hole, and Chirrut wishes he had slick, wishes he could manage to stutter out directions to Baze to wait, to stay a moment, to not finish him because he would rather empty himself further, deeper inside of Baze where his cock can wring pleasure from him as well. Or have Baze’s fingers stroke his prostate in time with the workings of his tongue, but Chirrut is too far gone for those ideas, doesn’t have the necessary items anyway. This will be enough for now, this is better than anything that has haunted him in dreams, woken him to his hand wrapped around himself in the night so that he would finish with Baze’s name on his lips even as the hole between his ribs expanded to swallow the pleasure, leave him less complete than before.

No, this is not that. This is the furthest thing from that. This is lips and teeth and tongue and breath, the beating heart of the man he loves more than anything else in the universe, even more than the Force itself. Chirrut cants his hips up in time to Baze’s motions, head back, eyes closed because it is so good even though it really does not change any of his perceptions, lets himself be as loud as he wants for once, thrills when Baze does nothing to quiet him such that his groans are enough to fill the entire room, seem to bounce from the floor to the ceiling to his shoulder. Baze catches the hand in his hair, pulls it to settle against his cheek, and it is not seeing. It is not seeing Baze’s adoring gaze as he works him to completion, it is not the flush and the heat and the kiss bruised lips, the sight of which he would drink in the way he would drink in everything about his husband, become drunk on it utterly. No, it is not that, but it is still good, it is still so good that he keens and thrusts up, deeper, further into Baze’s throat, and he lets him, meets his thrusts with ardor, grips and pumps at the base of him with an insistence, the kind of impatience that becomes sexy on Baze because it shows itself so seldom. 

“Ah, love,” Chirrut begins, the beginning of a warning, means to slow his hips, to give Baze the option to move back if he wants to, but Baze takes him in all the way, swallows around him, hums, does all the things that he has learned over the course of years that will push Chirrut completely over, that make him come loudly, Baze’s name ricocheting around the room on the end of a gasp. He should have known that it would still be just as good. Baze forgets nothing, hides everything inside of his body somewhere, is a master of just about everything he tries even though it sometimes takes him longer to get there.

Baze swipes his tongue across the slit in his cock, and Chirrut whines, overcome with sensation, feels emptied out and lightheaded, practically useless, drops onto the bed on his back, panting, scrubs one hand over his face even as the other remains on Baze’s cheek, stroking through his beard and over his lips, which part to suck gently at his fingertips. “Ah, love,” he says again, quickly followed by, “Fuck.”

Baze turns his face, presses it against his thigh and chuckles, kisses, bites lightly, over and over, until Chirrut thinks that he could thicken, could go again, just settle into a loop of infinite pleasure at his hands. As if sensing his thoughts, Baze nuzzles against his cock, mostly soft, runs lips and tongue over the skin in a teasing, careful way, making sure not to overstimulate, though it is almost too much. Almost too much and infinitely not enough at the same time, but not quite what he wants at the moment. Chirrut shifts away from Baze’s caresses and his lingering, gentle kisses that make him feel like something fragile, like porcelain plates and vases so fine that one could see through them when held to the light. Baze has always touched that way as though he forgets that Chirrut is steel through and through, but then Baze vowed to be gentle. It was part of his marriage vows, part of his Guardian vows, to never hurt in word or deed if he could avoid it. 

“What did I ever manage to do to deserve your heart?” Chirrut mutters, does not mean to say it aloud until it is there, floating between them. He extends a hand in the general direction of where Baze is and motions for him to join him on the bed. 

Fingers twine through his own even as the bed shifts, creaks, protests the weight of two adult males who are dense, covered in muscle, powerhouses in and of themselves even though one of them is as soft inside as a baby bird. “Well, now, my heart, you are annoying, but at least you are pretty to look at,” Baze teases, and Chirrut laughs.

“Yes, at least there is that,” he says, tips his head up, fingers out to try and locate the other, but Baze is ahead of him, leaning down to catch his mouth, sighing into it, all tongue and teeth and a hand cradling his neck, fingers dancing across the skin there. He is bolder now, the way he always gets once he has worked an orgasm out of Chirrut, as though it proves something to him, loosens something in him as well. Or just that he has figured out that nothing is going to slam in his face, that this is home, that this is love, and he is welcomed back. Baze has always been skittish about abandonment, which is strange considering that he is the one who left.

Baze breaks the kiss off with a startled, moan of pleasure when Chirrut’s fingers find his heavy cock, wrap around it and stroke, slow, slow and tight, just the way that Baze likes, the way that he learned when they were young and shy, his fingers questing and experimenting until he did it just right, and Baze came like a firework in his hand, all at once and with a blush across his face as red as Chirrut had ever seen it before. He wonders if he can get him to do that again, twists, runs his thumb over the head, feels Baze twitch and shift, the groan he presses into his neck followed by a light bite. He thrusts into his grip without any real rhythm, just enjoying the friction, the closeness. 

“I missed you,” Chirrut says as though the other doesn’t already know, hasn’t known since before he stepped away into nothingness, into his own disaster. He could leave it there, could leave it heavy and emotional and true, but he decides to pursue another course of action, one pleasurable for them both. There have been enough heavy truths for the day. “I missed your lips around me.”

The words earn him a shudder and another bitten off moan against his neck, an insistent cant of Baze’s hips that means for him to keep going both with the stroking and the words. Baze can manage teasing, light and almost flirty, and sometimes wishes when Chirrut has worked him over enough, but he stutters and grows flustered and tongue tied with dirty talk, cannot manage to get the words out. Though he loves to hear them. Chirrut can remember passing him in hallways, whispering filthy things in his ear when they were meant to be in the middle of an assignment and then spending the afternoon wrapped around each other because once he lit the fire in Baze’s body there was nothing else to do but quench it. 

“I have missed the feel of you when I am deep inside of you. Your breathy sighs. How you moan into my mouth. I savor every moment of that. You are the loveliest man in the world like this when my hands are on you and you are hard for me. You are so beautiful when you come.” Baze’s breathing is fast, hitching in his throat that matches the quick shifting of his hips, and he is close, Chirrut knows that he is close from the way he sighs and keens low in his throat, all the sounds he will never make, traps them deep, deep inside of his body, and Chirrut rests his free hand on Baze’s chest so that he can feel them as they trip from one side to the other, strokes him only slightly faster but without loosening his grip at all. 

He rubs his thumb across the head again, and Baze’s lips press against the pulse point in his neck over and over, followed by a litany of muttered words that are so soft that he can barely hear them, but he does hear them, and they make him shudder. “Chirrut, please. Love, please.”

Strokes faster and moves his head enough to guide Baze’s face to his, to press their lips together and swallow the sounds that his husband will never let loose into the air, wants to devour them and send them spinning into the blazing infinite sun that is his heart. Baze kisses sloppy now, completely lost in the moment, in the rush of it all, hips still arching shallowly into the thrusts, and Chirrut squeezes right when he knows he should, feels Baze’s entire body shudder as he comes with a choked cry that slips slightly into the air between them because he cannot keep the kissing up. Chirrut wrings him through coming down, the hand on his chest petting over the muscles and the heavy flesh, soothing him through the aftershocks that rock his body like earthquakes, leans in to press light kisses on the skin over his heart and then up, up across his chest to his neck through his beard and back to his mouth where he lingers, could linger forever even as Baze’s cock twitches its last for the moment in his hand. There is spend and sweat all over both of them and Chirrut could not care less, has never been more content in his entire life than he is in this moment as Baze drags a heavy arm across his shoulders and pulls him closer, kisses him back, still needy, still speaking of much, much more to come once they have the necessary items, but sweet, too. 

There is a vow in there, Chirrut can feel it bloom like a flower against his tongue, passed from mouth to mouth, lungs to lungs. Never, it says, never again, and he believes it because it is Baze.

They are thirty-eight and naked, wrapped around each other on the small bed in a ruined temple they once called home, and Baze keeps kissing him, and his kiss is perfect, his kiss is everything. Chirrut’s insides are a star field, big and flickering, an unending glimmer that feels like it will remain forever, will only continue expanding, will swallow them both down completely within it, and he will not mind; he will not mind at all.

**Author's Note:**

> As always please feel free to come shout at me on [Tumblr](http://sarkastically.tumblr.com/).


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